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“Both may be perfectly true! A man may smuggle tea and leave a fortune. Indeed I should think that rather the point of the enterprise.”

“He did not smuggle tea, Mamma,” Elizabeth said. “He had a timber concern in Derbyshire and shipping interests in Bristol and Liverpool.” She had watched him sketch ships on scrap while explaining the difference between a brig and a schooner. “And he gave us the pianoforte and the bonnets from Paris before the war.”

“Timber!” Mrs. Bennet scoffed. “That is what they call smuggling when they have been caught and are trying to sound respectable. I always knew he was a man of secrets.”

Mr. Sowerby, who had been trying to read a will for the better part of twenty minutes and had managed only about two complete sentences so far, cleared his throat with the vigor of a snoring horse.

“If I might be permitted⁠—”

“Money is money,” Mrs. Bennet declared, as if tying up a parcel for the post, “and eighty thousand pounds is eighty thousand pounds, no matter how it was come by. Lizzy must have new gloves. I must speak to Hill about supper, and Jane, you will inform Mr. Bingley tonight—surely you will see him?—that your sister is now a woman of considerable fortune.”

“But, Mamma, what does Lizzy’s fortune have to do with me?” Jane asked.

“Especially if she won’t share it.” Lydia flung her bonnet on the table beside the will. “Mr. Sowerby, is there a condition where Lizzy loses the money and it goes to her youngest sister?”

“Hey, what about me, her second youngest?” Kitty aped Lydia’s posture, propping her hands on her hips.

“‘He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent,’ as Fordyce so justly warns us in his Sermons to Young Women,” Mary intoned.

“Perhaps we might allow Mr. Sowerby to finish before examining the moral aspects,” Mr. Bennet interposed. “Let us hear the conditions. Knowing my brother, he never gave anything without… a bit of diverting fun for himself.”

“What fun will he have from beyond the grave?” Mrs. Bennet contended, but even she stopped her fluttering long enough to hear what the solicitor had to say.

Mr. Sowerby blew his nose loudly and shook out his handkerchief. “Thank you, if I might continue.”

“Proceed, pray.” Mr. Bennet folded his newspaper and laid it on the table. “We are all agog.”

The solicitor scanned the document before him. “There are certain particulars attached to the bequest. Miss Elizabeth Bennet shall inherit the sum of eighty thousand pounds, provided she is married by the twenty-fifth of March next.”

“Married?” Mamma exclaimed, and Elizabeth’s hands went cold against the table’s edge. Uncle Henry had sat in this very room and told her she was the cleverest of his acquaintance and ought never to let any man dull her. And now he had written her into a condition that required one. She had not yet finished mourning, and now she was not sure whether she had begun.

“It is not fair in the least,” Lydia announced to the room. “Why should Lizzy get a husband and eighty thousand pounds?”

“I was not aware that one gets a husband, Lydia. I had always supposed one endured one.”

“Then we must round up a husband for Lizzy.” Mamma rose to her full height, her lace collar heaving and reporting for duty. “It’s only a few weeks away. But not to worry. We have time enough to scout out a groom, read the banns and⁠—”

“Three weeks,” Elizabeth said. “We are in mourning. It is hardly the time to…”

“Half-mourning,” Mrs. Bennet proclaimed, “and if your uncle decrees you must marry in three weeks, then you shall.”

“But… this is too precipitous,” Elizabeth protested.

“Now, Lizzy, when your uncle specifies it in a will, he is meant to cause consternation,” Mr. Bennet reminded them of his prankster brother. “He must be laughing up wherever he is now, watching us.”

“But he has condemned me,” Elizabeth fumed, her fists tightening.

“A marriage by Lady Day,” Mary reported, settling her spectacles more firmly upon her nose. “Has a significance beyond mere tradition. It is the day of the Annunciation when an angel told the Virgin she would be with child.”

“Nobody asked for a history lesson,” Lydia snapped, “when a grave injustice has been foisted upon us. Uncle Henry meant to make sport of us by stipulating it would be Lizzy who has to marry in three weeks—Lizzy who can’t even get a proper gentleman to dance with her.”

“But, there is that Irish fellow,” Kitty volunteered. “Charlotte Lucas’s cousin. That Byron Lefevre who danced with Elizabeth all autumn.”

Byron Lefevre, who had only laughed when she trod on his foot in the second set and insisted upon another, as if a bruised toe were the highlight of his evening. She had liked him well enough, but liking was a far cry from marrying.

“Byron is charming,” Mrs. Bennet said, already calculating. “And Irish! They are so passionate. He would do very well for you, Lizzy, and with eighty thousand pounds you might live in Ireland half the year and London the other⁠—”

“But, Mamma!” Elizabeth protested. “You said yourself that Mr. Lefevre was not quite a gentleman and he has no fortune.”